Bergen stroked his chin thoughtfully. “So we would need to deactivate the ramscoop fields, yes?”
I nodded agreement. “The tender vessel is large. I don’t think that it could work its way through the fluxlines, even with the protective field from the gravitic polarizers.”
“This would take time,” Svensdottir said. “We must avoid instability of the field as it is being shut down. The fusion drive is most delicately balanced.” She stood. “I will go below and begin programming the shutdown mode.”
I blinked. I had anticipated some more doubt, maybe even opposition, debate. But then, they were desperate in here. The long years had worn them. Then I knocked on their door, bringing safety freedom, hope.
I swallowed what I was feeling. Concentrated on images of innocent faces, a woman’s severed hand.
After the old gray woman left I looked over at Bergen. “She seems a bit hard edged.”
“That is true. But she has kept Feynman going, all this time.” He smiled a bit, against his innate Herrenmann sobriety.
“You mean she’s been on duty the entire trip?”
He nodded. “From the time we boosted away from Wunderland, just ahead of the kzin. She took one look at the destruction of the Serpent Swarmer fleet behind her, and refused coldsleep.” Bergen looked pensive. “Since the lifesystems on board don’t work terribly well, we take frequent shifts. But the old woman…well, she has stayed on shift for nearly forty years.”
“Odd,” I replied.
“Space is deep, Herr Höchte. We are the same age, she and I,” Bergen said. “I slept most of the time.”
“Could you have not talked her into shifts? After all, spending one’s life this way…” I pursed my lips, gestured around me at the slowboat.
He shrugged. “She insists.”
Typical Herrenmannen behavior.
I nodded. “A formidable woman. You have all been brave. Earth will hail you.” Might as well hand out the compliments. It relaxed people. Madchen Franke smiled, clearly a rare expression for her.
I shrugged. “Well, while your estimable leader is looking over the fusion drive shutdown parameters, we have one more order of business.” I reached into my carryall and very casually removed a stylus. I wanted to take care of this as quickly as possible, just in case there were further complications. I did not want anyone doing anything to ship systems without my supervision. Too much risk.
Careful to breathe through my nose I twisted at the cylinder I was holding. An invisible, inaudible puff complete surprise. An incipient shock on Bergen’s face glazed to a sleeping mask. The welding laser thumped uselessly on the floor below Franke’s nerveless fingers. Her expression was little different, awake or asleep.
Quick and neat.
Invisible nose filters no longer needed—the gas degraded to harmlessness in less than thirty seconds—I heaved a great gasp of the ship’s pungent air. Pocketing the stylus, I carefully laid them out flat on the control room floor. Then I reached for the welding laser. Time to do a little hunting.
“I knew it.” Suddenly I realized that I had half expected the voice from the hatchway—but why? I turned around to face the fragile old woman. The laser would not be necessary. Svensdottir, unarmed, ignored me completely. She was looking at the bodies of Bergen and Franke.
I said nothing. She ignored it.
Her eyes finally raised to mine. “Are they alive?”
“Yes,” I told her calmly. Soothing. “A simple nerve gas. It will wear off in a few hours.”
“You are working for the kzin.” Not a question.
I nodded again, removing the nose filters and stuffing them into a pocket. I didn’t want to insult her or myself by explaining my actions. How could she possibly understand?
“I suppose that you will put me down now, like some kind of inconvenient pet.” I could see the harsh lines deepen around Svensdottir’s mouth in the control-room light. Disapproval carved those features, like a great-aunt surveying some broken dishes left by a clumsy toddler on an unwanted visit.
“Hardly,” I told her. “My…employers…will need you left alive, as guides and teachers.”
Her eyes narrowed, then widened. She seemed to instantly grasp the Trojan Cat gambit. “Never.”
“That is what I said,” I said softly, almost kindly. “Now look at me.”
“Well, what is next, traitor?” I couldn’t look at her eyes. Didn’t want to see the accusation peering from that old face.
I paused, wet my lips. The words were difficult. “There is something you can do for me.”
The old woman said nothing, stony-faced. I could see that she was a hard woman, had always been a hard woman. She fairly vibrated with her hatred at my betrayal.
“Tante,” I said softly.
She looked up at me sharply, face gone rigid. Her pale eyes stared into mine, studying, studying. Her wrinkles seemed etched deep by pain and loss. I knew how she felt. She raised a wisp of an eyebrow, her Herrenmann ears long and incongruous on her thin face. “You shouldn’t call me your auntie,” the old woman said at last, her tone almost gentle. “You are a traitor.”
“Did you know Helga Schleisser?” I finally asked, ignoring her insult.
Another long silence, then she sighed. “Ja. She was a proud woman; perhaps too proud.” Dry crackling precision. “She had her duty and honor to carry out. It was a heavy burden for her to bear.” Svensdottir considered it for a moment. “Perhaps too heavy.”
I snorted in derision.
The old woman poked me hard with a gnarled, fearless finger. “Do not make light of honor and duty, nor their weight, Herr Höchte. They are qualities that set us apart from the beasts.” A frown deepened her wrinkles. “Yet too much attention to those qualities makes us little different than the ratcat teufels, is it not so?”
I nodded. I couldn’t stand much more of this. The stylus was a burning weight in my pocket. I suddenly remembered Sharna’s bell-like laugh in the welcoming darkness of our compartment.
“What happened to Helga Schleisser?” I persisted.
“I’ll show you,” the old woman replied, and motioned me toward the corridor. I let Svensdottir lead the way. She was unarmed. My micrograv reflexes were better than hers. I had nothing to fear.
The curving corridor finally led to a sealed hatch, which the old woman unlocked with an identikey from around her neck. The hatch sighed and slid aside, releasing foggy, bitterly cold air into the corridor. I shivered. A chilly brush of the liquid nitrogen at 77 degrees Absolute. A touch of the grave—though a temporary one. Dim lights flickered on inside the ceramic chamber.
I followed her into a connected series of cargo holds, filled from floor to ceiling with row after row of identical cryosuspension bunks. Svensdottir seemed to know exactly where she was going as she passed the stacked ranks of coffinlike containers. Finally, she stood in front of one lower-tier coldsleep bunk, gestured. I could see the name illuminated by glowing lights on the case: HELGA YAKOBSON SCHLEISSER.
The coldsleep bunk was empty.
I looked back at Svensdottir in confusion. Just in time for the magneto wrench to catch me in the pit of my stomach.
I drifted to my knees in the low gravity gasping, grabbed for her legs—and she clubbed me again, behind the ear this time. Sharp pain. Contracting vision.
“I couldn’t do it, my son,” she told me sadly. When I could open my eyes, bright lights swam before them.
Somehow she had gotten a welding laser and was pointing it at me. Cool, stern. She had set all of this up. Set me up, smooth as water ice. “Uh, I—”
“I thought that it was wrong to sleep away the decades, to let others bear my burdens. I had lost Henry, you…everything. All I had left was keeping Feynman going, and reaching Sol. Just honor and duty.” She gestured at the stacks of coldsleep bunks. “These are all the experts we could find on the kzin, people who knew what little we had learned about fighting them. We even have some kzinti warship wreckage as cargo. Maybe the
Earthers can do a better job at understanding the ratcat tech.”
I tried hard to catch my breath, my mind racing. “You knew it was me all along.” The laser did not waver.
My mother nodded. “The years have not been kind to me, watching the fusion fires of Feynman burn, and keeping the systems functioning. Useful work but it had its price. But you, Kenneth, have become the image of your father; how could I not know you?”
She stared at me for a long time. Her eyes were deep, unyielding. Yet I could remember them now from other, ancient days. An imperious weight on me.
I did nothing. What was there to say?
“We have a few coldsleep bunks open. I will put you into one, and deal with this trouble at Sol.” She gestured with the laser for me to get up. “The kzin can kill us, but they will not board us.” I believed her utterly.
“Don’t you want to know why?” I asked her.
She shook her head, bird-quick. “Not particularly. I had expected a possibility like this one. Just not a son of mine leading the betrayal. We can sort all of that out in six months or so. There is no time now. I have preparations to make, to deal with your masters.”
My mother paused for a beat, then continued. “The signal laser has been down since the kzin near-miss when Feynman left Wunderland. We don’t have the spare parts to fix it. So I cannot tell the status of Sol, Wunderland, or the kzin. I had to be careful. It was well I had prepared.”
I started to get to my feet, reaching out a hand for support.
“Easy now,” she warned, backing away from me.
“Without the signal laser, you couldn’t have stopped the kzin from boarding Feynman.” I was angry, suddenly. My sacrifice was not even needed. All of this, for nothing!
A cold smile. “Perhaps it would be worth trying for the kzin, but with the ramscoop fields and fusion drive, I think we could keep the ratcats at bay.” She gestured more insistently with the laser. “Get up.”
“You don’t understand,” I told her, standing upright. “I had no choice.”
The lines in her face deepened. I could see her flush beneath her fusion tan. She snorted, features sharpening in a sneer. “You were only following orders, I suppose?”
“Hardly.”
She gestured at me once more with the welding laser, toward one of the coldsleep chambers. Once inside, the autodoc routines would sedate me and start the chill-down cycle. I didn’t have long to think of something. Her right hand covering me with the laser, my mother’s left danced across the keypad. She stood out of the way as the readouts beeped musically.
The panel in front of me hissed as a series of lights blinked green across its diagnostic readout display. The coldsleep bunk access opened, like a sideways coffin lid. I paused.
“Mother. Please listen.” I met her icy gaze sideways. It was my last chance.
She said nothing, but neither did she shoot me. If I failed, Kraach-Captain would send his message back to Wunderland, and my family would die. An image of sharp white teeth, designed to shear through living flesh, came into my head unbidden.
“This means nothing to you, perhaps,” I found myself saying urgently. “The ratcats have my family. Your grandchildren. I had no choice.”
It was time. Bet a little, bet it all.
I leaped backward. The laser spat a high-energy pulse where I had been a moment before. Where it hit the coldsleep bunk electronics fried and sputtered. An alarm shrieked.
I swept the welding laser from my mother’s grasp. It pinwheeled across the chamber. I ducked with Belter reflexes, rolled, and came up with the gas stylus in my hand.
“Sorry,” I said, the words out of my mouth a surprise. My mother looked at me, shock and resignation tightening her face. She didn’t beg. I’ll give her that.
“Is it true?” she asked.
“What?”
“About your family?”
Her question surprised me. “Of course. Any other threat I could have answered with suicide.” I reached into my shipsuit pocket and pulled out the nose filters, pushed them in, breathed deeply—and the stylus hissed. The gas puff cloaked her face instantly.
She shook her head as if to clear it of cobwebs, and slowly slid to the deck “Not your fault,” she muttered. “Never had the chance…to raise you as…a Herrenmann.” Her eyes flickered, closed. The lined mummy face smoothed with unconsciousness.
I recovered the welding laser and slung it over my shoulder. I picked her up and carried her to the control room. She was feather-light in the microgravity.
Around me the ship hummed on. Anybody home? It would be like her to hide backup crew member, or booby traps. I was angry, jittery with reaction.
I kept the laser ready but the corridors stayed empty. In the control room I put her on the floor with the other two and did some quick analysis with the shipboard computers. They were little different from the computers in the Swarm; the kzin discouraged innovation.
INTERNAL INVENTORY: ACTIVE: IR. No other infrared radiators at 37° C in Feynman. No movement other than small cleaning and maintenance autobots. Good. I’d had enough surprises for one watch.
Time to complete my job. I looked at the three bodies at my feet and breathed heavily. It had been a very near thing. I checked them over quickly again. Vital signs were all strong and steady, even my mother’s. Jacobi had not lied about the nerve gas. The three of them would be needed in good health by my ratcat masters, to explain the operation of Feynman.
I hated the way those thoughts sounded in my head. The deck thrummed under my feet. It was very quiet in the control room. Was this triumph? I thought of what my treachery had bought. I was different from Jacobi; I did what I had to for my wife and my children. My mother’s stern, weathered face accused me even while unconscious.
Jacobi was buying legs and a face. What had I bought?
I was delivering my children’s children, and their children, into slavery to the kzin. But at least they would be alive. There comes a time, I realized, to do what is right. Not what is best, actually. Nor what one would prefer to do.
What is right.
I thought of slavery and defeat and my family. Of honor. Of empty platitudes about freedom versus the harsh reality of a frost-rimed severed hand in a cryobox. I thought of orange striped shapes flashing through a forest, pursuing human children.
My children.
It was time to send for Kraach-Captain and his Heroes, to turn Feynman into a Trojan Cat full of kzin hardware, soldiers, and weapons. To help that Trojan Cat prepare to break the back of the defense perimeter around Sol, to allow the next kzin fleet to destroy and conquer as they had at Wunderland. But at least I was not helping the aliens in exchange for a new pair of legs, no.
I was better than Jacobi…yet a tiny voice jibed in my head. Nicht wahr? How, exactly?
My body seemed on autopilot as I walked away from the sleeping bodies, down the main ring corridor. The holocube felt very heavy in my inner pocket as I walked back to the airlock and I re-entered the singleship. My fingers automatically went so far as to orient Victrix’s signal laser correctly. I could tightbeam the message directly…
My fingers paused. First, it would take me some time to unravel the shipboard instructions for shutting down the ramscoop fields and fusion drive.
In my mind’s eye, I could see the kzin armada breaking the back of Sol. Tightening their grip over all of human space like a clenching fist. I could see my great-great-grandchildren, close-mouthed slaves in some kzin household, wielding blowdryers and brushes on their indolent predator masters.
Just another slave race, eventually no better than a degenerate Jotok.
The image sickened me. I could imagine those future generations reviling my name in private, slaves whispering to other slaves in low voices while their masters slept. Tiny humans scurrying around huge kzin households, secretly cursing the names of the humans who had sold their birthright, their future. My descendants would not remember them. But I did. The hated names flowed easi
ly over the tongue, echoing in my mind.
Arnold.
Quisling.
Chien.
Easterhouse.
Upton-Schleisser.
I turned away from the commset. Quickly, not thinking any more, I left my singleship. Back into Feynman. I walked to the three lying in a drugged stupor. I looked down at them, emotions warring within me.
My wife, my children: they would die if I failed, yes. All life’s sweetness, gone.
But they would at least know that I, husband and father—and most of all, human—finally believed in things larger than myself.
One human can make a difference, no matter what people like Jacobi said.
And perhaps it was not too late.
I made my decision. Swearing gently, I reached into my pouch for the antidote ampoules to the nerve gas. My fingers shook a little, but I ignored it. I stabbed my mother’s wrinkled neck with the drug and waited for her to wake up.
This was going to be hard. Owning up to who you are usually is.
My mother had been right, damn her stern soul. Once a Herrenmann, always a Herrenmann.
She coughed once, her eyes fluttering, and tried to sit up.
When she finally became coherent, I told her everything.
•
Chapter Four
Punica Fides
Go out like a rocket, boy, not like a fizzled, wet match.
My mother had said that. It had a certain dark ring that appealed to me.
Once again I made the journey from the kzin troopship to Feynman, across the Deep between stars. This time, though, I did so in a small kzin fighter, not my tiny singleship Victrix. The ship interior was huge, orange-lit, built on a scale for kzin. The air was cold and dry, making my sinuses ache. I moved unobtrusively to one of the gunners’ stations, the straps at their tightest ludicrously loose on me. Jacobi was strapped in across from me. I refused to look at him.
The engines thrummed softly and I could hear Kraach-Captain and Alien-Technologist hissing and spitting from the control cockpit forward. The sour-spicy smell of anger filled the cabin. I tried to ignore the angry sounds. At least this gravitic polarizer didn’t give me a hammering headache.